The study of Tibetan state history has taken leaps and bounds over the last twenty years, and with it our understanding of the complex and intertwined histories that linked the Plateau to its imperial neighbor. Few objects in that history have a more contested presence than the Golden Urn, the ritual lottery system deployed in Tibet by the Manchu emperor Qianlong in the late eighteenth century to choose the high incarnate lamas (Tib. tulku) of Tibetan Buddhism. As one of the centerpieces of modern China's claim to sovereignty over Tibet, in modern times the urn was most famously used by the Chinese authorities in 1995 to support their choice of the reincarnation of the Tenth Panchen Lama, a choice hotly contested by the exiled Tibetan administration in Dharamsala.

In such a context, one might expect that Max Oidtmann's Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet would be either a polemical or a journalistic work. However, Oidtmann is clearly first and foremost a historian, and his work is marked by an exemplary scholarly discipline and a wish above all to understand the complex nuances of the issue. More substantively, what he brings to the table is an extensive insight into the thinking and debates over the Golden Urn's introduction among the Manchu authorities, and most particularly those of the aging Qianlong emperor (1711–99) himself.

Famously, the emperor—committed to the patronage and defense of Geluk schools of Buddhism in Tibet—was incensed by the apparent weakness of the Tibetan authorities in the face of Gurkha aggression from Nepal, which led to the sacking of Tashilhunpo Monastery in 1791. Qianlong attributed that failure to aristocratic nepotism in the choice of senior incarnate lamas, most particularly the Eighth Dalai Lama. More specifically, he blamed the Tibetan state oracles, whose role in the choice of incarnates was almost definitive at the time. He asserted a grave suspicion that their choices were motivated by the interests of leading Tibetan and Mongolian families rather than of the gods. Throughout 1792, his response was threefold: firstly, to demand the removal of oracles from the process; secondly, to pen the imperial edict, Discourse on Lamas (translated in the appendices); and finally, to introduce the Golden Urn lottery system.

Oidtmann shows how the Discourse on Lamas queried not only the increasing correspondence between tulku and aristocratic lineages in both Tibet and Mongolia, but ultimately the tulku system of religious leadership in general. This often brought the emperor into lively debate with the imperial representatives (ambans) stationed in Tibet itself, who were acutely aware of the centrality of incarnates in all aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, and the crucial role of oracular declaration in securing their public legitimacy among ordinary Tibetans and Mongolians.

More important still is Oidtmann's adroit and nuanced analysis of how precisely the Golden Urn was understood in Manchu conceptions of rule, and how this needed to be handled at the imperial peripheries. Despite its religious resonances in modern debates, at the time of its implementation as policy in Tibet the Golden Urn was an intentionally bureaucratic device, well-established as a means of overcoming local corruption and nepotism in the choice of regional and provincial magistrates. Rather than being understood as a means of divining the will of the gods or Buddhas, the urn was simply designed to randomize choice among reasonably suitable candidates.

Obviously, this placed the Golden Urn method directly at odds with established Tibetan understandings that the purpose of the selection procedure was to unearth the true incarnate, and Oidtmann deftly charts the many means by which this contradiction was bridged: through surrounding ritualization and prayer, through debates over the divinatory powers of the officiant overseeing the ritual, or simply by covering up the controversies and tensions that emerged in subsequent Manchu (and Tibetan) accounts. Across all of these, Oidtmann argues for a much wider use of the Golden Urn system—not just for the Dalai and Panchen Lamas—by the time of Qianlong's death.

Overall, Forging the Golden Urn presents crucial nuance and detail to existing debate on this historical period, which is given to retrospective polemic from all sides. Probably most up for debate here is his listing in the appendices of the roughly eighty occasions on which the Golden Urn was used to recognize Tibetan Buddhist incarnates at many levels, and the sources that provide accounts of the events. Nonetheless, should such a debate need to be adequately informed, Oidtmann's account and analysis will now prove indispensable.